On soccer, the futility of lines, and thin air
So Belgium, my country, got kicked out of the Soccer World Championships. Big deal, right?
Oh, dear.
I’ve never been a sports’ fan, I confess. I don’t mind people loving sports and cheering on a team, but here in Belgium things tend to take on a slightly shizophrenic air.
You should realize this tiny kingdom has been shaken by fierce nationalism for over two decades now. A substantial part of Flemish voters would like to see this pocket country split in two, seperating Flanders from its French-speaking half Wallony. All my life I have seen that divide grow wider. It’s not a divorce, not yet. But we’re coming close, and it’s making me sad.
It’s this image (pointed out to me by a friend) that wears me out: a Belgian flag waving proudly over the entrance of a pub that in any other day won’t hesitate to show its alt-right, white supremacist colors.
It would be beautiful if only it wasn’t so sad. We were all Belgians for a few weeks here. Until now, that is, since tonight the Belgian Devils lost and it’s back to normal. We can go back to being Flemish and Walloons, Dutch-speaking and French-speaking, not understanding each other and definitely not accepting anything or anyone foreign. Now the national feeling of bonding is over, we can go back to being narrow-minded, racist and scared.
I’d like to tell those people at the pub: there is no way you can pretend to be an all-white alt-righter one day, racist and xenophobic and actively campaigning for Belgium to split, and cheer on the most multicultural, multi-ethnic Belgian soccer team the next. You just can’t. Unless you have no f*cking clue what you are cheering on in either, or both, cases, to begin with.
And the sad truth is: we usually don’t. We just need something to hold on to, whatever that is. The world is full of these examples that will strip the illusions of nationalism, race, identity and culture down to its bare essentials: an illusion.
We are primates, and as primates we know group culture, and rivalry. We feel, deep down in our guts, that there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. The ‘us’ is the group we happen to belong to — our gene pool, our survival guarantee, our social environment. ‘Them’ is everybody else.
And flawed though it is, we keep manifesting this same kind of behavior in different circumstances and we don’t even realize we are being completely unlogical. We can one day fervently cheer on the soccer team of a country we live in but would in fact like to see fall apart. We will hail the multi-racial, multi-colored bunch of second and third generation asylum seekers and immigrants as heroes and ‘our boys’, until the competition is over and we will once again spit in their faces and call them aliens, perpetrators and vermin.
The walls we erect between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are not even paper-thin. They are conjured out of thin air, a figment of our imagination, a story we tell ourselves to make us feel better because if we are good others surely have to be less, or at least opponents. It gives us an excuse to treat others in ways we wouldn’t even treat animals.
Am I talking about the insufferable violations committed against human rights at the US-Mexican border? I am. But in different shapes and sizes, these very same things are in fact happening all over the world. We will fortify ourselves within castles of our own making, within walls we have constructed from nothing, and we call it ‘us’. That gives us the right to fight ‘them’.
Sometimes I wish a big flood wave would come rolling onto the beach where these bands of mindless babboons are fighting each other, and wash the shores clean.
In my darker moments of desillusion, I feel we deserve no better.
